Being a postmodernist means mixing the high brow and the low brow, cultivating multiple selves, rejecting the idea of personal authenticity, and maintaining that truth and knowledge are somehow human creations and relative to human purposes/different cultures. Further, it consists in incredulity toward the idea of progress and lack of belief in reason, plus taking generally a skeptical stance, not least toward political ideologies.1 Indeed, the arch-postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard famously defined postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarratives”2. The pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty (...) fitted the postmodern bill by and large.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop CultureStefán SnaevarrPhilosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture, edited by William Irwin and Jorge J. E. Gracia. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, 297 pp., $29.85 paper.There has been quite a boom lately in the market for philosophical books on popular culture. The young American philosopher William Irwin has led the way by starting the fad of "... and philosophy" books; the (...) first one that Irwin edited was Seinfeld and Philosophy. So it is only fitting that he is one of the editors of this volume on philosophical interpretation of popular culture. In contrast to most of the earlier books of this kind, a sizable number of the contributors to this volume belong to the top brass of America's aestheticians: Noël Carrol, Ted Cohen, Carolyn Korsmeyer, and Richard Shusterman, to name but a few. The book is divided into two parts, "Philosophy and Popular Culture" and "Interpretation and Popular Art Forms." These titles are self-explanatory; it might be added that the aforementioned top brass dominates the first part.Irwin provides the book with a witty and well-written introduction, but he operates with a very wide definition of popular culture, classifying movies as such as items of pop culture. However, the medium surely is not the message. The fact that novels can be part of popular culture does not make Joyce's Ulysses a pop cultural object. Irwin's chapter, "Philosophy as/and/of popular culture," is rather two papers in one. One half addresses the concept of popular culture, containing an insightful critical evaluation of, among others, Noël Carroll's concept of mass art. The other half proposes that we can use popular culture to disseminate philosophical ideas to the general public. More so than in the introduction, Irwin is actually rather critical of popular culture in this chapter. He worries about its negative effect on culture in general—no cult of pop culture here. In addition, he rejects the notion of popular culture having the potential of becoming philosophy or its surrogate. He reminds us that Socrates used examples from everyday life and the popular culture of his day to make his philosophical points. In a similar fashion, the popular culture of today can be a stepping stone for philosophers to reach wider audiences. If you cannot beat them, join them! Popular culture could, for instance, be used to warn the public against its own evil aspects. This is an excellent idea, and I could not agree more; I myself often use examples from popular culture in my own lectures with good results. Irwin should expand on this idea and present it in a separate article.Richard Shusterman's chapter does not add much to his earlier writings. It is also somewhat like two articles in one; the first is a criticism of the denigration of pleasure and entertainment as aesthetic values, and the second half is an attempt to bridge the divide between intrinsic value and instrumental value. Both halves [End Page 111] contain some excellent arguments, but popular culture tends to be on the fringe in Shusterman's argument. The focus is on other more traditional, philosophical issues. Perhaps another venue would have been more suitable for this article.In contrast to Shusterman, Caroline Korsmeyer addresses the issues of popular culture in a fairly straightforward manner. Popular culture can be educational, even philosophically so. This claim does not mean that works of popular culture are works of philosophy in the ordinary sense of the word. However, we can "treat philosophy as a success term to refer to works demanding imaginative engagement that results in the recognition... of a philosophical position, such that what is done in philosophy proper that induces a possible conclusion is done in another genre by means appropriate to its appreciation" (31). Given this understanding of philosophy, we can understand works of popular culture as vehicles of philosophy. Korsmeyer maintains that the TV series Angel conveys some of Simone de Beauvoir's ideas from one of her books. Korsmeyer's chapter also contains a delightful discussion of "the probable impossible" and "the possible improbable" in fiction. But... (shrink)

This book argues that there is a complex logical and epistemological interplay between the concepts of metaphor, narrative, and emotions. They share a number of important similarities and connections. In the first place, all three are constituted by aspect-seeing, the seeing-as or perception of Gestalts. Secondly, all three are meaning-endowing devices, helping us to furnish our world with meaning. Thirdly, the threesome constitutes a trinity. Emotions have both a narrative and metaphoric structure, and we can analyse the concepts of metaphors (...) and narratives partly in each other's terms. Further, the concept of narratives can partly be analysed in the terms of emotions. And if emotions have both a narrative structure and a metaphoric one, then the concept of emotions must to some extent be analysable through the concepts of narratives and metaphors. But there is more. Metaphors (especially poetic ones) are important tools for the understanding of the tacit sides of emotions, perhaps because of the metaphoric structure of emotions. The notion that narrations can be tools for understanding emotions follows from two facts: narrations are devices for explanation and emotions have a narrative structure. Fourthly, the threesome has an impact on our rationality. It has become commonplace to say that emotions have a cognitive content, that narratives have an explanatory function, and that metaphors can perform cognitive functions. This book is the first attempt to articulate the implications that these new ways of seeing the three concepts entail for our concept of reason. The cognitive roles of the threesome suggest a richer notion of rationality than has traditionally been held, a rationality enlivened with metaphoric, narrative, and emotive qualities. Stefan Snaevarr (Reykjavik, 1953) studied philosophy and related subjects in Norway and Germany. Professor at Lillehammer University College in Norway, he is the author of several books of various kind in English, Norwegian and Icelandic. (shrink)

The ways in which the sciences have been delineated and categorized throughout history provide insights into the formation, stabilization, and establishment of scientific systems of knowledge. The Dresdener school’s approach for explaining and categorizing the genesis of the engineering disciplines is still valid, but needs to be complemented by further-reaching methodological and theoretical reflections. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social practice is applied to the question of how individual agents succeed in influencing decisively a discipline’s changing object orientation, institutionalisation and self-reproduction. (...) Through the accumulation of social, cultural and economic capital, they succeed in realising their own organisational ideas and scientific programs. Key concepts for the analysis include the struggle for power and resources, monopolies of interpretation, and the degree of autonomy. A case study from the Aachener Technische Hochschule shows that the consolidation of ferrous metallurgy can be conceived as a symbolical struggle between Fritz Wüst, professor for ferrous metallurgy, and the German Iron and Steel Institute, leading to a construction of a system of differences in which scientists accepted being scientists rather than entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs accepted becoming entrepreneurs and renounced science. (shrink)

Towards a critical posthumanism -- Genealogy of posthumanism -- Our posthuman humanity and the multiplicity of its forms -- Posthumanism and science fiction -- Interdisciplinarity and the posthumanities -- Posthumanism, digitalization, and new media -- Posthumanity, subject, and system -- Other side of life.

An English double-embedded relative clause from which the middle verb is omitted can often be processed more easily than its grammatical counterpart, a phenomenon known as the grammaticality illusion. This effect has been found to be reversed in German, suggesting that the illusion is language specific rather than a consequence of universal working memory constraints. We present results from three self-paced reading experiments which show that Dutch native speakers also do not show the grammaticality illusion in Dutch, whereas both German (...) and Dutch native speakers do show the illusion when reading English sentences. These findings provide evidence against working memory constraints as an explanation for the observed effect in English. We propose an alternative account based on the statistical patterns of the languages involved. In support of this alternative, a single recurrent neural network model that is trained on both Dutch and English sentences is shown to predict the cross-linguistic difference in the grammaticality effect. (shrink)

ABSTRACTLocke’s influential discussion of agency in the chapter ‘Of Power’ in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding underwent important changes between the first and second edition. He reconside...

Is it appropriate to blame people unequally if the only difference between them was a matter of luck? Suppose Alice would drive recklessly if she could, Belen drove recklessly but didn’t harm anyone, and Cleo drove recklessly and killed a child. Luck-advocates emphasize that in real life we do blame such agents very unequally. Luck-skeptics counter that people aren’t responsible for factors beyond their control, or beyond their quality of will. I’ll defend a somewhat reconciliatory view. I’ll concede to the (...) skeptics that these agents are equally culpable. Nonetheless, I’ll suggest with the luck-advocates that it’s fitting to blame them unequally. That’s because their culpability is unequally significant for us: Cleo’s culpability concerns us more than Belen’s, and Belen’s more than Alice’s—just like the fault of a close aggressor concerns us more than that of an aggressor far off in place and time. And it’s fitting for us to respond with more blame to faults that concern us more. Indeed, blaming people simply in proportion to their culpability manifests a form of fetishism, or problematic mere-matter-of-principle concern. So while many skeptical tenets may hold, in substance the luck-advocates are right. (shrink)

In this paper we give an analytic tableau calculus P L 1 6 for a functionally complete extension of Shramko and Wansing’s logic. The calculus is based on signed formulas and a single set of tableau rules is involved in axiomatising each of the four entailment relations ⊧ t, ⊧ f, ⊧ i, and ⊧ under consideration—the differences only residing in initial assignments of signs to formulas. Proving that two sets of formulas are in one of the first three entailment (...) relations will in general require developing four tableaux, while proving that they are in the ⊧ relation may require six. (shrink)

There is some limited contemporary scholarship on the theory of metaphor Kant appears to provide in his Critique of Judgment. The dominant interpretations that have emerged of Kant’s somewhat nascent account of metaphors are what I refer to as the symbolist view, which states that Kantian symbols should be viewed as Kantian metaphors, and the aesthetic idea view, which holds that Kant defi ned metaphors as aesthetic ideas . In this essay, I claim that the symbolist view of Kantian metaphors (...) is not plausible and that we should accept the aesthetic idea view in its stead. The jumping off points for my discussion are two fairly recent essays on the subject: A. T. Nuyen’s “The Kantian Theory of Metaphor” and Kirk Pillow’s “Jupiter’s Eagle and the Despot’s Hand Mill: Two Views of Metaphor in Kant.” Nuyen defends the symbolist view of Kantian metaphor and Pillow defends a split view, i.e., Pillow thinks Kant has a dual-aspect view of metaphor that can bear both the symbolist and the aesthetic idea interpretations. Although I make use of some of Pillow’s objections against the symbolist view, I conclude that both he and Nuyen are wrong in thinking that Kantian symbols have any relationship to Kantian metaphors at all. Lastly, I will provide my own positive account of Kant’s theory of metaphors as well as show how this debate affects Kant’s overallaesthetic theory. (shrink)

This manuscript describes the institutional and clinical considerations that apply to the question of whether to mandate opioid dose reduction in patients who have received opioids long-term. It describes how a calamitous rise in addiction and overdose involving opioids has both led to a clinical recalibration by healthcare providers, and to strong incentives favoring forcible opioid reduction by policy making agencies. Neither the 2016 Guideline issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nor clinical evidence can justify or promote (...) such policies as safe or effective. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein ist zweifellos einer der bedeutendsten und einflussreichsten Philosophen des 20. Jahrhunderts – und das, obwohl er zu Lebzeiten kaum etwas veröffentlicht hat. Bis heute wirken der Stil seines Philosophierens und seine Radikalität auf viele philosophisch außerordentlich inspirierend. Hinzu kommt das Schillernde seiner von Anekdoten umrankten Persönlichkeit, die in etlichen biographischen Werken aufgearbeitet wurde. Stefan Majetschak gibt einen konzisen Überblick über Leben und Gesamtwerk dieser Jahrhundertfigur und spürt ihren Wirkungen nach.

The Measure of a Man ist der Originaltitel der 9. Episode der 2. Staffel von Star Trek – The Next Generation, die im Mittelpunkt meiner Überlegungen steht. Hierin beabsichtigt der Kybernetikforscher und Sternenflottenoffizier Bruce Maddox, Forschung am Androiden Data durchzuführen, in der Hoffnung, schließlich Data-ähnliche Androiden erschaffen zu können. Die Forschungsprozesse implizieren jedoch Eingriffe, mit denen das Risiko einhergeht, dass Data zerstört wird, weshalb Data nicht bereit ist, an sich forschen zu lassen. Die entscheidende philosophische Frage diesbezüglich ist: Handelt es (...) sich bei Data um eine Sache oder um eine Person? Ein Weder-Noch stellt hier die plausibelste Antwort dar, wie in diesem Artikel gezeigt wird. (shrink)

It is well known that Ernest Gellner made substantial use of his knowledge of the social sciences in philosophy. Here I discuss how he used it on the basis of a few examples taken from Gellner’s philosophical output. It is argued that he made a number of highly original “translations”, or re-interpretations, of philosophical theories and problems using his knowledge of the social sciences. While this method is endorsed, it is also argued that some of Gellner’s translations crossed the line (...) between the original and the idiosyncratic. (shrink)

Die vorliegende Arbeit hat den Leibnizschen metaphysischen Optimismus und einige der weniger bekannten Stationen und Zuge der Rezeption der "Essais de Theodicee" und des Theorems von der besten Welt im deutschen 18. Jahrhundert zum Gegenstand. Sie erhebt nicht den Anspruch, eine auch nur annahernd vollstandige Darstellung des Verlaufes der Debatte um die "beste Welt" zu geben. Angesichts der Fulle der zeitgenossischen Einlassungen und Ausserungen zum Thema war eine Auswahl bestimmter Rezeptionsmomente vorzunehmen. Auf die Prozesse der Verwandlung einer strikt metaphysischen Theodizee (...) hin zu einem populareren, dafur aber auch anfechtbareren Optimismus will diese Arbeit ebenso hinweisen wie auf den Umstand, dass nicht erst die Kantische Schrift "Uber das Misslingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodizee" von 1791 die (philosophische) Problematik der Lehre von der besten Welt dingfest macht. (shrink)

Methods and equations for analysing the kinetics of enzyme-catalysed reactions were developed at the beginning of the 20th century in two centres in particular; in Paris, by Victor Henri, and, in Berlin, by Leonor Michaelis and Maud Menten. Henri made a detailed analysis of the work in this area that had preceded him, and arrived at a correct equation for the initial rate of reaction. However, his approach was open to the important objection that he took no account of the (...) hydrogen-ion concentration (a subject largely undeveloped in his time). In addition, although he wrote down an expression for the initial rate of reaction and described the hyperbolic form of its dependence on the substrate concentration, he did not appreciate the great advantages that would come from analysis in terms of initial rates rather than time courses. Michaelis and Menten not only placed Henri's analysis on a firm experimental foundation, but also defined the experimental protocol that remains standard today. Here, we review this development, and discuss other scientific contributions of these individuals. The three parts have different authors, as indicated, and do not necessarily agree on all details, in particular about the relative importance of the contributions of Michaelis and Menten on the one hand and of Henri on the other. Rather than force the review into an unrealistic consensus, we consider it appropriate to leave the disagreements visible. (shrink)

Encompassing a wide range of subjects, the ten masterful essays gathered here may at first appear unrelated to one another. In truth, Giorgio Agamben's latest book is a mosaic of his most pressing concerns. Take a step backward after reading it from cover to cover, and a world of secret affinities between the chapters slowly comes into focus. Take another step back, and it becomes another indispensable piece of the finely nuanced philosophy that Agamben has been patiently constructing over four (...) decades of sustained research. If nudity is unconcealment, or the absence of all veils, then _Nudities_ is a series of apertures onto truth. A guiding thread of this collection—weaving together the prophet's work of redemption, the glorious bodies of the resurrected, the celebration of the Sabbath, and the specters that stroll the streets of Venice—is inoperativity, or the cessation of work. The term should not be understood as laziness or inertia, but rather as the paradigm of human action in the politics to come. Itself the result of inoperativity, _Nudities_ shuttles between philosophy and poetry, philological erudition and unexpected digression, metaphysical treatise and critique of modern life. And whether the subject at hand is personal identity or the biometric apparatus, the slanderer or the land surveyor, Kafka or Kleist, every page bears the singular imprint of one of the most astute philosophers of our time. (shrink)

In this paper, I use Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of noesis and noema to investigate the connection between experience and place, a relation which I call “geographical experience,” using a term coined by Edward Relph. Following the correlative structure of lived experience, geographical experience is enabled by the lived body as the noetic part and place as the respective noematic part. Both parts belong together necessarily. However, in this experiential field, distortions and an eluding aspect of place appear in the relationship (...) between body and place. These distortions point to an aspect of geographical experience that cannot be fully grasped by the noetic-noematic structure of experience. They indicate that the reality of place is not completely constituted by this correlative structure but nevertheless becomes apparent in and through it. (shrink)

This edited book examines conditionals from a number of interdisciplinary perspectives, drawing on research from fields as diverse as linguistics, psychology, philosophy and logic. Across 13 chapters, the authors not only investigate and examine various commonly-held perceptions about conditionals, but they also challenge many of the assumptions underpinning current conditionals scholarship, setting an agenda for future research. Based in part on the papers presented at a unique international summer school - Conditionals in Paris - this volume represents the cutting edge (...) in the study of conditionals, and it will be of interest to scholars in fields including linguistics and psychology, semiotics, philosophy and logic, and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

The etymology of the Egyptian word ṯwn.w ‘fighting bull’ is treated once again. The connection of this word with the root ṯwn ‘to stab’ by Morenz is supported with new arguments. Goring by bulls can be demonstrated in textual sources as well.

This book analyzes the identity crisis found in nineteenth-century post-Romantic literature. By mirroring several Antihumanist theories through the Jungian theory of the shadow, the author argues that this literature anticipates our contemporary “internal conflict.”.

Over the past 20 years, the participation of laypersons or representatives of civil society has become a guiding principle in processes of research and innovation. There is now a significant litera...

El ángel de la historia, en las tesis de Walter Benjamin, mira hacia atrás por tres razones: Primero, porque epistemológicamente es inevitable y necesario mirar hacia atrás, o sea: el ángel no puede ver adelante y tiene que mirar hacia atrás para poder entender su entorno. Segundo, porque onto..

Ethos wird von B. Echeverría verstanden als die Gesamtheit aller materiellen und ideellen Alltagsformen, einschließlich der je spezifischen Gebrauchswerte. Die parallele Existenz vier verschiedener Ethos-Grundformen: das realistische, das romantische, das klassische und das barocke Ethos, bildet die begriffliche Grundlage eines nicht-progressistischen Erklärungsmodells innerhalb einer materialistischen Kulturtheorie. Die Anmaßung des heute vorherrschenden realistischen Ethos, „einmalig” und „modern” zu sein, wird nicht mit einem Schuss Postmoderne, sondern mit einer kritischen Theorie des vierfachen Ethos der kapitalistischen Moderne quittiert.

1923 schrieb Carl Schmitt sein Werk «Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus» in einem äußerst antiparlamentarischen Umfeld der Weimarer Republik. Auch wenn das Werk später den Nationalsozialisten zur Machtergreifung verhelfen sollte, ging es Schmitt insbesondere darum, den Parlamentarismus zu kritisieren, um das demokratische System zu stärken. Begriffe wie Ausnahmezustand, Freund und Feind, Volonté Générale und Staatsmythos flankieren seine Kritik am Parlamentarismus. Die Arbeit stellt nicht nur Schmitts Kritik heraus, sondern geht auch auf seine persönlichen Alternativen ein. Hierbei kommt es zur (...) Beantwortung der zentralen Frage, ob die Demokratie sich in ihrem Kern nicht als ein utopisches Konstrukt herausstellt, unabhängig von der zeitlichen Verortung. (shrink)

In 2018 more people than ever—70.8 million—were fleeing war, conflict, and persecution, according to a report from the UNHCR. This was the first time the figure exceeded 70 million. Internal refuge...

Neo-Assyrian Specialists: Crafts, Offices, and Other Professional Designations. By Heather D. Baker. The Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, vol. 4, pt. 1, Professions Index. Helsinki: The Neo- ASssrian Text Corpus Project, 2017. Pp. xvii + 397. $94. [Distributed by Penn State Univ. Press, University Park, PA].